A smart and friendly shell

Teach a Man to Fish…

The fish shell provides many features that rival the well-known Bash. We examine some highlights.

The home page for the Friendly Interactive SHell (fish) [1] still proclaims it "the command line shell for the 90s." However, with version 2.1.0 released in October 2013, fish remains in active development and includes dozens of small innovations that together make the command line a friendlier place.

Fish is available in the package repositories of many major distributions [2]. If yours does not include it, you can download the code by cloning the GitHub repository with

Professional users are always searching for an edge. Whether you work with Linux as a webmaster, programmer, system administrator, or security consultant, you know the best solution depends on finding the right tool for the job.